


Fractures

by deathwailart



Series: The Courts [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Banshees, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Character Death, Character Study, Domestic, F/M, Family, Folklore, Gen, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Scottish Character, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-04-29
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:10:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about motherhood when you're a banshee, the little cracks that you don't notice until they already run deep, how you count down the years and hope for the best whilst pushing down your fears all the while loving your children, especially the one who'll bear your burden, more fiercely than anything in this world.</p>
<p>Belongs to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/718075/chapters/1330354">these</a> <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/718075/chapters/1330355">verses</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Fractures

Iona loves both her children, her twins favouring their father in looks with their black hair and blue eyes from the outset. Shirley and Cedric two tiny things she loves fiercely already knowing she won't have nearly as many years with them as she wants, old and gone before they have children of their own. They're happy babies, good children and she's used to exhaustion now to the point where she can't remember what it's like to be well rested so being up and down at all hours never bothers her. Lachlan calls her superwoman, proud and astonished and she loves him just as much as she loves her babies.  
  
She's twenty-three when she has her babies. She was nineteen when she met Lachlan. She's got twenty-seven years left before she goes and her mother has four. Such is the price of the power gifted to her family and she lives it to the fullest.  
  
Still she's unprepared when her mother goes. She feels it deep in her bones, howls so violently the children are terrified as what was her mother's is passed on to her in one fell swoop where she has to shoulder another generation of pain, another generation of grief and when she looks down at Shirley's tearful eyes she whispers sorry over and over. She can't tell her little girl why yet, why she's sorry because she's too young to understand much of death beyond granny being gone and buried in the ground. She'll have her whole life to know death and grief more intimately than most will ever understand. Lachlan has more worry lines around his eyes than a man of his age should because he knows too. She tries to hide them both from death because Cedric and Shirley are inseparable, laughter and smiles and playing at knights and ladies (or knights and witches or knights and dragons – no matter what game it is, her daughter wins and Cedric seems to accept it, tackling her and rolling around in the grass so they come in with dirty knees and elbows, traipsing mud into the house.)  
  
That's the image she holds onto. The little girl who laughed easily, who was sweet and giving, who didn't mind getting dirty and playing rough. But she never forgets that her little girl always won.  
  
When you only have so many years left you notice how quickly time passes, slipping through your fingers the more you try to hang onto it and Shirley ceases to be a girl and becomes a woman in the blink of an eye, with blood and tears as it's always been. Iona has put things off far too long. It's a selfish thing but she doesn't want this struggle for her daughter and all the awful things she will have to bear, this line her mother tried to break and Iona should have tried to put a stop to but perhaps this story is meant to play out this way until the end and Iona is only a pawn in something larger than herself. This should be a happy time to embrace what lies ahead but it's not.  
  
"You know we're different to other families, you and I more than your brother and father," she begins and sometimes she likes to forget (because she can't forget, not in truth) that there will always be a line dividing her from even the men related to her by blood, the same line that divides her from the rest of the world, "that you and I are banshees, fairies?"  
  
"Yes?" Shirley is a smart girl, like her brother too, both of them smart as a whip and hesitance is unlike her. Iona gathers her closer and rests her cheek against her head.  
  
"We come from a long line and what we are is a gift from-"  
  
"The gods," Shirley interrupts and Iona nods, smiling despite herself.  
  
"Yes. And now you're a woman in the eyes of the world and the gods. It comes with..." Her throat is so tight she can barely breathe and she's meant to be strong, to be a mother when all she wants is her own to pull her close and help her explain this so Shirley can grow up as happily as Iona did. "It comes with power. It comes with death."  
  
"I know what a banshee is mum. I know what we are."  
  
_You don't sweet girl_ , Iona thinks, _You won't know until it hurts._ "The world is going to feel different now, you're going to feel death all around you, a tug in your stomach, a shiver down your spine. It won't be for another five years that you'll feel it strongly and while I live, as the head of our line, you won't feel the worst of it." Shirley says nothing, looking down at her lap as Iona strokes her hair and feels her heart beating frantically in her chest. She doesn't know what she wants her daughter to say, doesn't know if she wants her to nod and accept it, ask more questions or cry and scream about how it isn't fair, how she doesn't want this. They sit together in silence until Shirley squirms away, rubbing her stomach. Iona tucks her in, kisses her cheek and sits with her until she falls asleep, something she hasn't done since she was a little girl who always corrected her or Lachlan when they tried to skip a line in her bedtime stories to get to bed earlier themselves.  
  
Years later she'll wish her daughter had yelled. Maybe she would have fought harder. Or maybe this is what happens to someone who wants to end something begun by a goddess who thrives on the blood they spill for her and the grief and death they carry around in her stead.  
  
Cedric is the first boy born to a woman of her family in generations – he's something of a mystery but he doesn't have to carry the same burden as his twin. They're so alike, the same hair black as a raven's wing, the same big blue eyes, the same tilt of the chin when they know they're right but somehow he is fairer than her, lighter. He sees death as much as she does, works in the family pub that functions as a safe haven in this world where those who the Veil hides can relax and laugh. The children have grown up with other fairies, werewolves, vampires, some demons, the odd seer or witch or wizard. Cedric knows as much of what being a banshee entails without shouldering the responsibilities but sometimes her son looks at her with old eyes, stares off into space and takes time to come back to himself. But Cedric laughs it off and gets on with things, his father's son who plays football and wants to study engineering, flirting madly with all the girls; he gets the fairy charm from Iona and wields it unconsciously until it's pointed out to him at which point he becomes awkward, ducks his head, rubs the back of his neck and goes pink. That earns him just as many smiles.  
  
"You know he sees the dead too," Shirley tells her for want of nothing when Iona is making tea. The shock of it makes her drop her cup so it shatters on the tile and she's frozen so Shirley is the one to pick up shards of porcelain in one hand with a sliver on her smile on her face. _I knew something you didn't_ , it says.  
  
"Why didn't he tell me?" Iona asks when she comes to and mops up spilt tea, taking the remains of the cup from her daughter.  
  
"I don't know," Shirley replies simply, tone light and airy. Shirley knows. Shirley simply won't tell her or at least she won't tell her easily. "Why don't you ask him?"  
  
"Why didn't _you_ tell me?" Iona counters more sharply than she wants to. She loves her daughter but there's a growing gulf between them that there never was between Iona and her own mother. There were arguments, there were things she didn't tell her and there were times of hostility and resentment but it never felt like this. She has the feeling there's a growing gulf between them and she is scrabbling to keep her footing and to make sure she and Shirley are on the same side.  
  
"It never seemed important."  
  
"Then why," Iona can feel the tightness of her jaw as she speaks, "are you telling me now?"  
  
"He was wondering why you kept looking at him all the time when he sees them. And if he's ever talking to himself he's giving them advice." Across the kitchen Shirley sips her tea, painted nails tapping against the china. She looks tired – only Iona can tell because she knows all too well what it's like – but as ever she holds herself up and looks strangely imperious at the same time. "Don't make a big deal out of it, Cedric's Cedric."  
  
"He never told me he could see the dead, _why_?" Iona presses.  
  
Shirley lets out an aggrieved sigh through her nose, takes another sip. "He thought it was because we were twins, that part of me carried over to him. I talked to him, he understands. There's nothing to worry about, he's perfectly normal."  
  
"And you're not."  
  
"He sees dead, he talks to them," Shirley doesn't even bother pretending she doesn't know what her mother's talking about and for that Iona is grateful. If there's one thing they're always open and honest about with each other, it's death. "What do we see? Oh wait, we just _know_. We know before anyone but Death himself and the gods that someone's going to die. We go there and howl on their doorstep. That's hardly normal."  
  
"Do you want to be normal?"  
  
Shirley sets her cup down with care but the quiet clink seems to echo to Iona anyway.  
  
"I want to be what I am. I want to be me."  
  
Iona learns what that means years later.  
  
Shirley's best friend is a Seer, one of those who would have been burned a long time ago, those who the Veil protects now. Cassandra and Iona loves her like another daughter and Shirley is at her best around her, laughing and smiling without a care in the world, careful too when Cassandra goes still and white from something she's seen. Cassandra has normal parents who don't know about her daughter's power and she has no plans to try to explain it to them despite the offers Iona and Lachlan make. Cedric is in love with Cassandra and despite token protests from his sister, they tangle themselves together as though they've done it before – maybe it's something Cassandra has seen but it's far too personal a thing to ask. At least any children Cedric has will be spared the same fate as a daughter of Shirley although Iona has to draw her own conclusions there and does so from the way Shirley recoils from babies and small children (dirty, noisy, wet, smelly things) or changes the subject if they're brought up. Maybe Shirley will be the last. Iona shouldn't hope because lines like theirs that have lasted so long should by all rights be kept going but it's a sign that Shirley isn't what she suspects she is. Fairies think differently and Iona has to suppress so much of herself afraid of what she'll become if she embraces all that is her heritage. She knows only the magic she needs but her daughter knows far more, her daughter who doesn't flinch when drawing a sharp blade across her skin even if all her power isn't quite there yet. What will she be after she returns from the Otherworld? Iona knows that she pushes down as much as she can. Shirley lashes out in her own way, she thrives on a sense of obligation, of equivalent exchange in a way part of Iona longs to, ravenous to let loose. If someone slights Shirley, if someone hurts someone she cares for then balance has to be restored. She hates to be given anything but is only too eager to give herself if it's worth her while.  
  
"I'm worried about Shirley," she tells Lachlan in bed when the twins' eighteenth birthday is drawing closer.  
  
"I know she's high-strung, a bit aloof but she's a good girl Iona," he replies. Shirley is the apple of his eye. He adores her and she adores him, daddy's little princess but he's not blind to her faults, at least not entirely but he prefers not to see them and dismisses things as something Iona is blowing out of proportion. "You're getting paranoid. I think a lot of them go through that stage of wanting to be superior and you've always told her to be the very best she can be."  
  
"It's not about that, it's about what she is. She'll have more power when she comes back Lachlan and some of what you see? That's not teenage girl. It looks like it but you know it's not Lachlan." She needs him to understand that his little girl, their little girl, is more than that. She's not human. She's never been human but every year is potentially another step away from a human life.  
  
Lachlan sighs and turns to face Iona, lying on his side. He still looks younger than her, not a speck of grey in his dark hair but there are still lines around his eyes. "She says she's not normal," he admits quietly as though confessing knowledge of a crime, "I think it scares her. She didn't sound like her when she asked if she was."  
  
"What did you tell her?"  
  
"That she was what she was, that she's my daughter and I love her no matter what. She is what she is and she shouldn't be ashamed of that."  
  
It's what a father should tell his daughter and Iona loves this man, loves how much he loves their children who are so different to him deep down but her stomach is tied in knots. "I'm scared for her too, I feel like she's slipping away."  
  
"We'll be here, we'll make sure she knows that we love her," Lachlan offers. Iona doesn't need to ask what happens if it's not enough. And she doesn't want to tell him that very soon they'll be cut off from her for a time where she'll be in a world he can't follow them to. Because that's where Iona will go when she dies and Lachlan will go somewhere far from there. So she pulls him close, kisses him and puts worries as far from her mind as she can.  
  
Her children are eighteen. She has less than ten years left. She wants to be selfish but she can't afford such a luxury. She has to make sure they're on the right paths before she's pulled to the Otherworld to wait for Shirley when it's her time. She has to make sure her husband knows just how much she adores him before he goes.  
  
The twins turn eighteen with the appropriate amount of fanfare. There's a party with all their friends, perhaps the last time some of them will see each other before they all go their separate ways to university. Iona could burst with pride as much as she could burst into tears. Tomorrow Shirley will go to Otherwold and Iona is forbidden to follow her the way she can any other time – this first visit must be made alone to be weighed and measured, to have symbols of power carved into her skin. Shirley knows that they're there because she's seen Iona's and they aren't forbidden to speak of it, it's encouraged in fact, to prepare them so the trip won't take longer than it needs to because time in the Otherworld flows far differently to the time anywhere else. Cedric is the one who leads at the party even if he always seeks out Cassandra with a smile that's for her alone. Iona has never needed to worry about Cedric who sees the dead and gives them advice the same as he would anyone who came to him with questions. He's an open book for the most part. Ask a question, he'll answer honestly and usually right away. He goes with his gut. Shirley is like a pool that Iona can't see the bottom of and can't even judge the depth of. It's more of an extraction with her daughter, teasing it out and she's never sure if she has the truth, a lie or anything in-between. Lachlan gets more luck with it but he doesn't ask in quite the same way nor does he ask what Iona does. He's satisfied with what he hears and it should be enough, she should trust her daughter but she sees those secretive smiles, notices the precision of her wording, the way she likes to collect favours the way a dragon does gold and part of her cannot be at ease around this child.  
  
"She's a banshee," Cassandra says quietly, at her elbow with those eyes a million miles from any of them as Shirley clinks a glass with one of her friends. (Although friend never seems quite right, everyone seems to fall into three categories with her: amusing, useful or interesting. It's another alarm bell but she can't work out how she's meant to bring it up without all hell breaking loose.) "True only to her blood."  
  
"Pardon?" Sometimes when Cassandra sees things she explains and they know what she's talking about. This time she jerks, blinks rapidly and looks around the room and then at Iona. The moment has passed, the spell is broken.  
  
"Did I say something?"  
  
Iona shakes her head and plasters on a smile. "No, you just drifted off for a moment, I think Shirley wants you." Her daughter is waving, bright-eyed. The wine in her glass looks like blood.  
  
A week comes and goes, Shirley vanishing in the night and the house is uneasy. Cedric is all nervous energy, flitting from one thing to the next and Lachlan decides to change every barrel in the pub, do every little odd job Iona's been nagging about for years and Cassandra is ghostly, her eyes so far from them when she's there. Iona's father stays and shakes his head. He's the biggest man Iona has ever seen even at his age and she's met so many things. As a girl (and even now if she's honest) he seemed as though he was from another time, a hero or a scholar born again. A hard man with a gentle heart, content to let the women take the lead, carving out his own space as need be; the pub was his idea and belongs to him and he's the one who's helped to make Lachlan understand. He's the reason Iona and Lachlan met in the first place.  
  
"I remember your mother when you vanished and how frantic she was."  
  
"I can't imagine mum being frantic," Iona admits and when he pats the couch she joins him, resting her head on his shoulder. "She seemed too composed for anything like that."  
  
"Aye, with everything that wasn't you she was the queen, regal and composed. Gods I love that woman." His tone is so fond that it makes her ache. Sometimes she felt isolated when she watched her parents together because they were so assured in their love enough so that sometimes she was scared it would swallow them and later that it would destroy her father but somehow it's made him stronger. He still sees her mother once a year on the night granted to any wife on Samhain when the Veil is thinnest, the night the Dagda lay with The Morrígan and there's never been anyone else for him. It gives her hope for Lachlan in the years to come. "When it was you I thought she'd go off her head. Pacing and muttering under her breath. But you turned out just fine."  
  
"I worry about Shirley."  
  
"You're a mother. It's your job. I'd be worrying more about that lad of yours – Shirley's all you and all your mother's and her mother back and back. That boy...I'll have to blame the McAllister side for that."  
  
Her laughter is a loud bark and it chokes her. She takes comfort where she'll get it and lets her father reassure her like he always has. Otherworld changes you but maybe it's Iona's own worries that prey on her mind for her to project on her daughter. At least she shows no signs of looking for a young man, changing them more often than her shoes, always finding them wanting in some way – that's normal. And every year she cringes more from babies, refusing to every babysit whenever Cedric and Cassandra settle down. Maybe when Shirley passes on (not something a mother should think about when her children are hale and hearty but they're not a normal family, they belong to the Unseelie Court and the Court of Ushers, they are fairies and omens of death) she'll take the grief with her to the Otherworld so no more daughters will have to shoulder yet another generation. With guilt thick and bitter at the back of her throat, she hopes.  
  
Shirley comes back in a week and sleeps for three days. She emerges to have someone help her apply lotion to the raw skin of her back with symbols etched in it, dragonflies, eyes, ravens, mirrors and Celtic Ogham and to gulp down tea and toast. Iona watches her sleep and the house calms again. Everyone is back under the right roof at least for now.  
  
"Did you get a gift mother?"  
  
Mother is a new thing. It's a Shirley thing unless Cedric is being silly and sarcastic. Overly formal but it suits her daughter now more than mum. "From the three?" Shirley nods and sets a knife upon the table with a handle made of pale wood, smooth, polished to a brilliant sheen and the blade slightly off-white. A small thin that easily fits into one palm. "It's beautiful, may I?"  
  
"Careful, it's sharper than I thought." There's a long cut down Shirley's index finger, the width of a paper cut but red and raised enough that it's obvious it went deeper. Not that cuts mean much to either of them now.  
  
"It's tradition to have a blade made of the bones of your ancestors."  
  
" _What_?" The shock – and horror – catches Iona by surprise because it's been a long time since she knew something her daughter didn't. Or, as is more likely, that Shirley hasn't controlled her reaction to make it seem as though she knew exactly what they were talking about.  
  
"This knife is made of your ancestors, their bones. When you bleed you bleed for them and for the one who made us what we are. You honour them each time," she explains as she hands the knife back watching her daughter run her fingers tentatively along the flat of the polished surface tentatively as though it might come to life. "Sometimes they tell you, sometimes they don't. I thought I told you years ago but it must've slipped my mind."  
  
"Do you get used to the time there? It felt so much longer than a week."  
  
"A week here is a month there, give or take but it can stretch or dilate as it sees fit – our rules stop applying once we're there."  
  
"The air vibrated, that's the only way I can describe it, there was this buzz I could feel in my teeth," Shirley continues, looking between Iona and the knife, "I saw gran."  
  
Tears prick at Iona's eyes. It's been too long since she went to the Otherworld. Too long since she saw her mother. "How was she?"  
  
"I thought she'd look old. She wasn't old when she died, not really, not for now." The words are said quickly as though it hurts to speak them and Iona knows that this isn't what Shirley wants when she's so close to being halfway through her life already before she's even lived it. "But there were times I looked and she had three faces, young, old and somewhere in the middle."  
  
"Three has meaning, three has power. Three faces, three stages."  
  
"She...she misses you. She wanted me to pass on her love." Iona reaches across to squeeze Shirley's hands in hers, a watery smile on her face. "She said she was proud of me."  
  
"Of course she is," Iona replies when she catches the confusion in her daughter's voice, "just because she isn't here doesn't mean she won't know what you've done. She has every reason to be proud of you."  
  
It's the closest Iona's felt to her daughter in so long, clutching her hands tight, both of them tearful and smiling. When Shirley lets go she dismisses the pang of loss.  
  
Otherworld taught Shirley more magic than Iona knows. She knows of it but she rarely uses it. She prefers the minimal spells that she has, the essential ones but her daughter has so many more at her fingertips now that she joins Iona before she leaves home with her brother and best friend. Iona can become a crow easily – it's the most useful form for them and the animal most strongly associated with them but Shirley can become others, wolf, hare, weasel and stoat that she knows of and maybe more. She can weave nightmares, summon illusions, see things in blood and protect herself and what is hers with the most deft and delicate of touches each time her knife cuts through her skin. Iona is in awe. Iona is horrified.  
  
It troubles her husband too when he sees how drawn their girl is, how white and wobbly she seems not just from the blood loss or the nights where they go and howl each time they feel the pull but from restless nights when she sleeps too. She doesn't wake screaming but they've both heard her tossing and turning in the night, looking more tired when she wakes than she did going to bed.  
  
"If there's something wrong you can always tell us, no matter what," Lachlan promises, brow furrowed with concern.  
  
"There's _nothing_ you can't tell us. No matter what we'll love you and help you," Iona adds.  
  
"I don't even remember what I'm dreaming about," Shirley confides in a whisper, "I don't wake up in the night, there's nothing there, I just don't sleep well now."  
  
Later, in bed, Lachlan tosses and turns until Iona puts on the light, unable to fall asleep either. "Is it Otherworld?" He asks in a ragged voice.  
  
"It might be or it might be her magic, I don't use half as many spells as her, it might be her adjusting to it."  
  
It does nothing to set his mind at ease but in time she seems to settle again. She looks healthier and less like a stiff breeze would blow her away, there's colour in her cheeks and she's holding herself as though holding court. Soon she's busy packing her things (and Iona is finding where some of her clothes, shoes and jewellery disappeared to in the process) to leave home for university and they feel like a normal everyday family, making lists of all the things they have to buy, Lachlan and Iona's father both heading down to do odd jobs around the flat with Cassandra's father. The girls are moving in together, Cedric is going to live with friends. Iona is under no illusions as to where he'll be sleeping - she's had the talk with him and they're both adults but she'll play along for the sake of Cassandra's parents. When she waves them off she worries, she cries and hugs them tight and thinks that it only feels like yesterday since she held them in her arms, tiny and red, screaming with their wrinkled faces and tiny fists and here they are, no longer needing her.  
  
"I love you both," she tells them with mascara down to her chin and Shirley and Cedric both have wobbling bottom lips, "I love you both so much."  
  
She'll always love them. Even when she's gone she'll love them. And she'll love Shirley even when she shows just how strong the fairy blood is in her.  
  
Cedric proposes to Cassandra halfway through university and there's a party. It's when Iona and Lachlan meet Blair, Shirley's boyfriend who has lasted a whole year to gain himself a formal introduction to the family. He's a few years older than her but Shirley has always liked someone more mature and he's very bright, well brought up and mannerly. It's impossible not to like him even if Iona can't shake the feeling that he's not entirely human but there's plenty going on, her son a grown man with a wonderful young woman and his whole life ahead of him.  
  
"We'll have two boys," Cassandra confides and her visions have been more clear these past few years spent around Shirley and Cedric without having to worry about what her parents might think, "I'm going to call them Lennox and Ruaidhrí," she continues with a bright smile and Iona thinks it must be wonderful to be able to see things with such clarity and with so much certainty even though she knows full well that there's great terror in it too with the burden of knowing things you cannot hope to change. "I don't think I'll tell him though."  
  
"If he's anything like his father he'll faint." Iona snorts in memory of when she told him she was pregnant in the first place and then again when they found out they were having twins.  
  
"Then I'll definitely want to savour it."  
  
"Have you ever-" Iona begins then cuts herself off. It's presumptuous to ask this, a breach of trust of both her daughter and her friend and their right to privacy and she perhaps doesn't want to know for anything other than her own selfishness even as something claws at her, hissing for her to keep speaking.  
  
"Have I ever?" Cassandra echoes with an arched brow.  
  
"Have you ever seen Shirley?"  
  
"She never changes in what I see, she always looks the same. Haughty, regal. Faraway, no," she frowns and looks over to her friend who is fortunately distracted with people Iona doesn't know, "elevated? It never makes sense when I see her. There's Blair too but someone else I don't know, I see green braids." Embarrassed and apologetic she looks down at her feet. "Sorry, not everything makes sense."  
  
"You don't have to apologise," Iona reassures, "I was being nosy."  
  
"It's hard to get a read on her even though I've been best friends with her since we were little."  
  
"Maybe she's more like my mother," she offers although there was never any sort of distance. Or friction. She notices it now more than she did when they lived under the same rough, a subtle struggle for dominance that Iona finds it harder and harder to win. She shouldn't be competing with her daughter but her daughter shouldn't be trying to challenge her. No one wants the line to be passed on too quickly.  
  
Not that there's long anyway. Maybe it's just that Iona was preoccupied with her children, maternal instinct trumping everything else.  
  
When you're running out of time, you learn to push things to the side simply so you don't lose more worrying over things you can't change. There are some worries she can't set to one side but those are mostly for Lachlan and how he'll be when she's gone and for her father who's going to lose both wife and daughter before he passes on and for Shirley and how she'll hold up with the full share of grief and the pain that comes with it. It's a visceral thing and sometimes it makes her want to laugh, that they feel it so keenly, that death which is meant to be sweet release builds in the base of her skull to throb and pulse, radiating down her neck and behind her eyes like the mother of all migraines until it's all she can think about. And then there's the pull to the right place in the black of night where she unleashes that dreadful howl that no human body could produce, the baying of a wolf, the hissing screech of an owl and the scrape of nails on metal. It's the sort of sound that promises nothing good, only the promise of pain and devastation. When it's done it leaves the body empty except for the grief that clings to them. To her she feels as though it's clamped around her like shackles, to her mother it felt like drowning and to her daughter it feels like a knife wound. It's why they don't live long. It saps them bit by bit and each generation has the cumulative grief of everyone who came before them and all the grief that's theirs alone. She always wants to apologise to Shirley for what her death will bring her but each time she can only hear her daughter telling her it's much too late for that.  
  
So she watches them grow up. Watches them graduate. Cedric and Cassandra marry and Lennox comes as promised, Blair is still there and proposes and to the surprise of all Shirley accepts and seems more at peace than she ever has, as though some great debate has been settled. She makes baby clothes for her coming nephew, fashions things for Cassandra ('Maternity clothing is hideous, if you're going to turn into a great, beached whale I'm going to make sure you look stunning') and starts up her own little life with Blair. Iona allows herself to feel indulgent and like a matriarch because that's what she is. She's the head of her line and it's ready to be passed on and her family is going to grow even if Shirley doesn't seem as though she's the one to continue it. And that's for the best.  
  
But she dreams. She wakes with startled gasps thinking there's a great wolf or hound settled over her and Cassandra's words about green braids sticks in her mind – she's met many a Cú Síth in her time but she can't think of why Shirley would have much to do with one. Still there's the way Shirley eyes her when she thinks no one else is looking although she's very careful to hide it as soon as Iona catches her. Speculative. Assessing. Or maybe it's her wondering what she'll do when her mother is gone because she asks more now about how Iona felt when it was her mother passing, always careful, always aware of how emotive an issue it is. They never do it when Cedric or Lachlan might hear though because it's hard for them. Being a father makes Cedric all the more aware of the fact that he's going to lose his sister and it must be worse that they're twins because they've _always_ been together since the very first moments of awareness. Instead they talk about Blair who seems much more neutral and his place in all of this.  
  
"How did you do it? How did you marry someone knowing you'll die and leave them?" Shirley asks.  
  
Iona doesn't have an answer for her. She suspects Shirley already knows anyone. Being a fairy involves a certain amount of pride and vanity and a degree of selfishness. If she's looking for confirmation then Iona is too tired to give it when the evidence is plain to see and if there's one thing Shirley doesn't need then it's validation of what she is.  
  
Then there's the birth and the chaos that comes with it, all of them in the hospital, Cedric more relaxed than Lachlan who is nervous enough for all of them, jiggling his leg until Iona slaps his knee so hard it jars her elbow, her father laughing, Shirley and Blair talking to Cassandra's parents because looking after Lachlan through all of this is a two person job. A baby is always a joyous thing and it's a boy, a boy who'll maybe see the future or maybe give advice to the dead but a boy who won't be burdened with a grief not his and Iona's tears are those of love and relief when she's the first one to hold the baby after his parents. Little Lennox, alive and exercising his lungs.  
  
"He sounds just like his auntie and granny," Cedric teases and when Shirley and Iona laugh.  
  
The day before Lennox and Cassandra go home she goes to visit them in the hospital and is surprised to find Shirley holding the baby. Shirley who still finds children to be, in her own words, 'ghastly' and who had left the room whenever childbirth came up looking green. There's no disgusted fascination on her face, instead she looks warm and soft, any sharp edges filed away with little Lennox holding one of her fingers in his chubby fist as she cradles him close.  
  
"It's so sad isn't it," she says quietly as though loathe to disturb the silence or perhaps she just doesn't want him to cry.  
  
"What is?"  
  
"That he's already dying. That we all are. We come into the world with a fat little maggot in us, it's just a tiny thing when we're born and it lets us grow nice and fat then it starts to munch away at us, sucks out everything vital, everything that's living until we're this empty husk." No one should talk like that with a child in their arms even when it isn't theirs and Iona wants to slap her daughter suddenly for saying such things but then she sees her wet cheeks and a vulnerability she never thought she possessed. So instead she stands frozen across the room, watching as Shirley traces her nephew's eyes and nose with a shaking finger, kissing his plump cheeks. She has to leave. She runs down the halls and throws up so violently it makes her swoon.  
  
Again the old dread in her stomach as she replays half a hundred fragments of conversations and worries at once, tries to pick through every little warning sign, reads through the lines and struggles in vain to find the moment where Shirley turned into this. When did she get so cynical and so bitter? How has she managed to hide it so well?  
  
She cries alone, great gasping sobs, composes herself, walks out and drives home. Lachlan is busy working and the house is silent. She cries herself to sleep because she can't fix this. It's too late to mend the fractures running through her daughter and she never noticed them until now. She told herself everything was fine, she lied to herself and swallowed her daughter's lies because it was easier. Cassandra was right. Shirley is a banshee, Shirley is the truest to their line.  
  
It's all of her fears come true.  
  
In a heartbeat two years have passed where she's felt as though she's on the precipice of something. Everything is too sharp, too bright. She feels like she's going mad and wonders if this is what death is meant to feel like, a slow spiral where she sees hidden meanings and frets over every rumour. In Otherworld (although her visits have slowed this past decade, she has all the time in the world stretching out before her there when she dies) there is much frantic talk of a Dullahan killed and his scythe stolen. Her mother shakes her head sadly as she confirms it.  
  
"Something's coming Iona, there's a storm coming."  
  
From the look in her mother's eyes she can see there's more she wishes to say but there are restrictions placed upon those there when they speak with those still in the world of the living. Whatever it is will have to wait. If it can wait.  
  
It can't.  
  
There is a flash and crack and that green hound the size of a bull who draws himself up as a man stood at her daughter's elbow, her daughter who looks down on her from above with wide eyes.  
  
"We have to go," the man urges and tugs at Shirley's wrist but she stands as if transfixed simply staring down at Iona.  
  
_I love you_ , Iona wants to say as she feels the blood pouring from her throat as she lies on the floor, _Darling I love you and I forgive you._ Blood, her blood, drips from the end of the scythe and her daughter looks like that little girl with grass stains on her knees and the young woman who in her cap and gown at graduation and some terrible fierce monster of carnage more suited to a battlefield. There's a sharp tug as her body tries to breathe even though it's impossible given how deeply the blade of the scythe cut her throat, her spirit being dragged to the Otherworld. She understands now. Part of her is already gone and there are no secrets now that she numbers among the dead and she wants to wrap her arms around her daughter and hold her tight, to give her forgiveness because Iona knows what's being done because the dead are given the world stripped bare. Shirley doesn't know. She thinks she does but she doesn't, her pride that might so easily be her undoing.  
  
Otherworld is not nearly so cold now.  
  
"Iona," her mother croaks and she looks the way she did when Iona was young, the queen of the castle, the matriarch supreme. "I'm sorry, I couldn't-"  
  
"Mum don't, please don't."  
  
For the first time in years her mother holds her tight and she feels it instead of the ghost of an embrace of before. There's a way to salvage this, to right it even though she can't fix it. When she looks up through worlds and watches the green hound with his braided tail running as a crow flies over him. Her daughter will have to come here soon enough and she'll forgive her, she'll hold her tight and tell her over and over how she loves her even if her daughter won't believe her and her mother will rail against it. Lachlan was right all those years ago: no matter what, she'll always love her daughter.


End file.
